Reading skills by Nahid Esfandiari
Approaches to learning and teaching reading 1. Reading within an environmentalist approach Up to the end of the 1960senvironmentalist ideas that avoided speculation about the workings of the human mind and concentrated only on observable facts outside the person. Moreover, modeling and practicing the correct structures time after time were paramount.Under such an influence, reading was viewed primarily as a passive, perceptual process. Environmentalist ideas shaped not just the theoretical conceptions of what reading was but also research Yet early reading research focused chiefly on the nature of perception during reading and it became mainly restricted to the relation between stimuli as words and responses as word recognition Reading comprehension by focusing on the development of decoding skills, and their major instructional task was to teach readers to discriminate among the visual symbols they encountered on a printed page before they could translate them into word sounds 2. Reading within an innatist approach Chomsky the basis for the innatist theory of language learning which claims that children are born with a predisposition to language acquisition. Goodman conducted one of the first studies to explain the role of errors or miscues ''made by readers when reading aloud and his experiment resulted in two important findings. First, learners were able to read a far greater number of words in context than without a context (i.e., word lists). Second, miscues were due to the reader’s intention to make sense from the written text Goodman posited that reading was a ''psycholinguistic guessing game ''in which readers guess or predict the text’s meaning on the basis of textual information and activation of background knowledge, then confirm or correct their guesses, and thereby reconstruct the message. In addition, he described the three sources of information (what he called ''cue ''systems) that readers make use of to reconstruct text meaning: 1) ''graphophonic cues ''(or knowledge of the visual and phonemic features); 2) ''syntactic cues ''(or knowledge of syntactic constrains); and 3) ''semantic cues ''(orknowledge of the meaning of words). '''3,Reading within an interactionist approach' A major development within this field was the emergence of story grammars. A story grammar is a structural account of narrative stories that readers develop, based on acquisition of knowledge about human interactions and repeated exposure to stories the story grammar categories for Stein and Glenn setting, which consists of characters and surroundings; 2) initiating event, which marks a change in the story environment; 3) internal response, which represents the goal; 4) attempt, which is the effort to achieve the goal; 5) consequence, the attainment or non-attainment of the goal, and 6) reaction, which is the outcome of the consequence. A schema theory, in Rumelhart’s words “is a theory about how knowledge is represented and about how that representation facilitates the use of the knowledge in particular ways. researchers found that an interactive ''process, i.e., it was a dynamic interaction between the writer and the reader in which the reader creates meaning from the text by activating his stored knowledge and extending it with the new information supplied by the text '''Teaching reading within a communicative competence framework' Hymes proposed the notion of communicative competence, ''which included both grammatical competence as well as the rules of language use in social context and the norms of appropriacy. In such a construct, the reading skill plays an essential role in facilitating the acquisition of communicative competence '''1.Discourse competence' the core of the proposed framework of communicative competence is the reading skill Discourse competence involves the knowledge of written discourse features such as markers, cohesion and coherence as well as formal schemata (i.e., knowledge of how different discourse types are organized) with reference to the particular communicative goal and context of the written text. 2.Linguistic competence Linguistic competence consists of the elements of the linguistic system such as grammar rules and knowledge of vocabulary. Moreover, the ability to read also involves the mastery of the mechanics of the language, such as the alphabet and punctuation All these features are set at the bottom level of the reading process and they are fundamental for the readers to be able to decode the written text. .3. Pragmatic competence Pragmatic competence involves an understanding of the illocutionary force of an utterance by being aware of situational and participant variables within which the utterance takes place, as well as politeness issues. This competence has been regarded as essential to understanding spoken communication in which the social contextual factors are explicit .4. Intercultural competence Intercultural competence refers to the knowledge of how to interpret written texts appropriately within their sociocultural context. Therefore, it involves knowledge of the cultural factors such as knowledge of the sociocultural background of the target language community, knowledge of dialects, and cross-cultural awareness .5. Strategic competence This competence refers to the possession of both communication and learning strategies With reference to reading, the former refers to the ability to use reading strategies to make up for interpretation problems, whereas the latter refers to the ability to use reading strategies to enhance the communicative act between the writer and the reader. Implications for reading instruction from reading research These implications provide a way to examine how research supports effective reading-instruction practices, and how teaching, materials development, and curriculum design could become more effective. 1. Ensure word recognition fluency 2. Emphasize vocabulary learning and create a vocabulary-rich environment 3. Activate background knowledge in appropriate ways 4. Ensure effective language knowledge and general comprehension skills 5. Teach text structures and discourse organization 6. Promote the strategic reader rather than teach individual strategies 7. Build reading fluency and rate 8. Promote extensive reading 9. Develop intrinsic motivation for reading Reading strategies strategies can be categorized into metacognitive (including purpose-oriented, comprehension monitoring, and strategies that focus on learning from text), cognitive (including strategies for interacting with the author and the text, strategies involving different ways of reading, strategies for handling unknown words, and those making use of one’s prior knowledge in some way), as well as social and affective strategies, among others. How do good readers use reading strategies? good strategy users from the reading research is that they are “strategic,” which means that they: - Are primarily focused on the drive to obtain meaning ''from a text, not on “using strategies”. Are aware of their ''purpose ''for reading, whether it be for pleasure, for obtaining important information needed to perform a task (e.g., for performing a procedure, writing a paper, making a decision), or to learn something new - Overview a text to decide if it is relevant to their purpose and to identify the portions that might be particularly relevant or helpful - Use strategies in ordered hierarchies that are generated from an analysis of the steps in the process needed to accomplish their task Know and utilize ''multiple ''strategies, including cognitive, metacognitive, affective, and other types, integrating and orchestrating their use in relation to each other, and then evaluating their effectiveness in achieving the purpose - Make use of, and integrate their prior knowledge, not only of the world, but also of the nature of texts, and of how they have used different strategies for different purposes in the past, to help them make sense of what they read - Make particularly effective use of metacognitive strategies, the “higherlevel thinking” (or “thinking about how one is thinking”), the monitoring system that readers use in order to direct and control their overall strategy use. They use metacognitive strategies for planning, selecting and using strategies, monitoring comprehension and effectiveness of strategy use, and learning - Make effective use of varying strategies for handling unknown vocabulary, with the quality of their strategy use more important than the quantity, - Differ in their use of strategies, depending on their gender, language and cultural background, age, beliefs, motivations, or learning style - Know if their strategy use was effective or not by assessing whether they were able to accomplish their purpose '''The importance of reading for a purpose' In “real-world” reading, there are many different authentic purposes for which readers read When we have a purpose for reading from the outset, our ability to accomplish our task can give us important clues about whether we have understood what we read. Fostering effective reading strategy instruction - Focus on establishing a purpose for reading - Extend over time – learning to become strategic readers is a long-term developmental process, - Be multi-componential, and thus, should focus on the teaching of multiple integrated strategies, oriented toward specific purposes. - Be different for different learners, depending on their language background, ethnicity, goals of study, proficiency level, learning styles, and gender. - Involve either explicit explanation or modeling (e.g., by “thinking aloud”) of strategies by teachers for students - Focus on helping students understand when and where to use strategies, either by explaining it to them directly, or by having them abstract it while practicing the use of strategies. - Teach students to monitor how they are doing in their strategy use, and to take corrective action when problems are identified; - Include specific information about the benefits of the strategies being taught, and thus, to motivate students to use strategies regularly Teach strategy use in context-integrated into the curriculum and into course content, rather than as a separate subject - Teach students non-strategic knowledge along with the strategies non-strategic knowledge involves background knowledge that readers need in order to make sense of what they are reading Using purposeful reading to develop strategic L2 readers Integrate purpose into the overall curriculum design Begin each lesson with a purpose Teach students to regulate their strategies for achieving specific purpose Help students access their world knowledge Build students’ vocabulary recognition through multiple exposures below illustrates some of the most common and troublesome beliefs and behaviors that may be barriers Language use, cultural identity, and translation Vocabulary acquisition and automaticity Sentence pattern processing and automaticity Level, amount, and appropriateness of materials L1 environment vs L2 environment How to build reading fluency Begin at the beginning – with your own reading Find plenty of appropriate materials Provide continuous motivation Vocabulary Reading: The narrow perspective . Component approaches 1. Language competence in reading 2.Syntax in reading .3. Vocabulary 4.Background knowledge 5.Reading ability” in L2 reading 6''Reading for language learning'' 7Reading skills Process models of reading 1''Data-driven models'' 2''Concept-driven models'' 3Interactive models 4Reinstating the bottom Reading: The broad perspective .1. Consequences of literacy 2. Social dimensions in literacy 3Implications for teaching Research on Reading a Second Language (Brown) 1.Bottom-up and top-down processing In bottom-up processing, readers must first recognize a multiplicity of linguistic signale (letters, morphemes, syllables, words, phrases,grammatical,cues, discourse markers) and use their linguistic data-processing mechanisms to impose some sort of order on these signals. Top-down or conceptually driven, processing in which we draw on our own intelligence and experience to understand atext. 2.Schema theory and background knowledge Schema theory,the hallmark of which is that a text does not by itself carry meaning .The reader brings information ,knowledge ,emotion, experience,and culture to the printed word. Schema theory is not anew construct. There are two categories of schemata; content and formal schemata . content schemata include what about people, the world, culture,and the universe while formal schemata consist of our knowledge about language and discourse structure. 3.Teaching strategic reading Instruction should of course provide an optimal mix of each, but Neil Anderson advocated a healthy dose of strategy –based instruction ,including metacognitive strategies of self- planning, monitoring, and evaluating one's own reading processes.William Grabe stressed the coordinated use of multiple strategies while students are reading. 4.Extensive reading Extensive reading is a key to student gains in reading ability, linguistic competence ,vocabulary,spelling,andwriting Green and Oxford found that reading for pleasure and reading without looking up all the unknown words were both highly correlated with overall language proficiency. 5.Fluency and reading rate Anderson is devoted to increasing reading rate, with suggestions for using skimming, scanning,predicting,and idedtifying main ideas as approaches to increasing fluency. 6.Focuse on vocabulary A strong relationship between vocabulary knowledge and late reading ability. 7.The role of affect and culture Language ego, self-esteem,empathy,and motivation undergird the acquisition of spoken discourse, reading is subject to variability within the affective domain. Culture plays an active role in motivating an rewarding people for literacy. 8.Adult literacy training A significant number of immigrant arriving in various nonnative countries and cultures are nonliterate in the native languages, posing special issues in the teaching of English.What are sometimes referred to as "skills-based"(bottom-up)and "strategies-based"(top-down) approaches are both used in adult literacy training. Strategies for Reading Comprehension 1.Identify the purpose in reading. 2.Use graphemic rule and patterns to aid in bottom-up decoding. 3.Use efficient silent reading teaching for improving fluency. 4.Skim the text for main ideas. 5.Scan the text for specific information. 6.Use semantic mapping or clustering. 7.Guess when you aren't certain. 8.Analyze vocabulary. 9.Distinguish between literal and implied meaning. 10.Capitalize on discourse markers to process relationships. Principles for teaching reading skills 1.In an integrated course,don't overlook a specific focus on reading skills. 2.Use techniques that are intrinsically motivating. 3.Balance authenticity and readability in choosing texts. 4.Encourage the development of reading strategies. 5.Include both bottom-up and top-down techniques. 6.Fllow the SQ3R sequence. 7.plan on prerading,during-reading,and after-reading phases. 8.Build an assessment aspect into your techniques.